[Dinging] [Soft music] - I'm Gal Beckerman and my book is "The Quiet Before on the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas."

I wrote it in response to something that I'm experiencing, that we're all experiencing right now.

The sense that communicating online, communicating on these big public platforms feels like it's not creating real intimacy or friendship or the kind of things that we imagined that it is.

But I wanted to apply that to this notion of change and how change happens.

'Cause it seemed critically important to me looking at the history and all that you do need these sort of spaces, these spaces where people can actually intensely engage with one another, imagine, debate, begin to think up new ideas.

[Thoughtful music] - [Ellison] You start back in the 17th century with Persque - [Gal] Yeah.

- He gets Galileo out of jail and gets him onto house arrest.

He's this really romantic figure for me.

Can you tell us about him a little bit?

- Presque was the hub really of this enormous network of letter writers spread all throughout Europe they call themselves the Republic of Letters.

These were intellectual, mostly men, who were (chuckles) I mean.

- Is what it is.

- I don't know, I'm apologizing for it, but it is what it is.

Clerics, aristocrats who were beginning to do what we now call science, they were, but it was quite dangerous at the time because the dogma of the church was still supreme.

They set the terms of what reality was, like where the sun and the earth were in relation to each other.

And these were people who were slowly beginning to chip away at those certainties.

And they were doing it through carrying out experiments, sharing data, making observations and getting one another's feedback on them.

It was this incredible sort of collective process of learning new knowledge about the world.

And letters were critically important 'cause it was a medium that has embedded patience.

You've tried a letter you have to sort of, it takes time, takes time to digest what's being said.

You can slowly bring people onto your point of view.

And that really worked for them in terms of both staying under the radar a little bit.

So they didn't get in trouble the way Galileo did but they were still able to carry out their work and do it as a slow deliberative, iterative process over time.

The story that I focus on is he's trying to figure out the correct size of the Mediterranean Sea.

The maps people were using were 1500 years old.

They were the maps sanctioned by the church and that's the way that it was.

And he had a sense that no, that we need a better transcription of nature, right?

So in order to do that you need longitude and latitude, right?

Latitude is pretty easy because you can just measure the height of the noon day sun, but longitude to carry it out you need observers placed in lots of different parts of the world all observing the same celestial thing happening, say an eclipse and observing when they see it.

And the difference in time will give you longitude, right?

But to get that, the people that do the observation are mostly missionaries.

They're mostly religious men.

The very people who would be most likely to just listen to what the church says about things.

So he needs to convince them and this is where letters become so important.

He convinces them to come along with a scientific experiment.

He's sort of cajoling them, trying to recruit them slowly, getting them to see that what they're doing is actually going to be helpful for the future.

And it's just sort of fascinating, what he was trying to get them to do is change their entire relationship to nature and knowledge.

If you think that knowledge comes only from what the church says it is and I'm telling you, no, actually with your own eyes you have the power to revise what the church says or come up with new knowledge.

That's a radically different approach to thinking about our relationship to the natural world.

And it's almost the most radical thing one can imagine.

You know?

It's the nature of truth and how truth is actually produced.

So a tweet would not have helped him.

- No.

(laughs) He needs to slowly bring these men over to his way of thinking.

And that's why it suddenly opened up to me this sense of, wow, the letter as a medium was so helpful in this because it did embed that sort of patience, that slow thinking.

It did create an atmosphere in which, you know, over time he could begin to bring them over.

And he was not trying to move too fast.

He was sort of finding the right arguments to fit each person.

Getting them to begin to think like scientists.

It's fascinating to see it take place slowly over time.

- And it's incredibly dangerous too trying to- - Yeah, it's dangerous.

- alter thought away from what the church is saying.

I mean, wow, that's ... - No, I mean literally, there was a man 20 years before this experiment in Giordano Bruno, who the church had burned in a public square because he started saying, well maybe, the earth isn't the center of the universe.

So this is not something that people are to take lightly.

(upbeat music) - [Ellison] You use technology in every chapter.

- [Gal] Yeah.

- It's a different technology for each section that you're looking at.

You've got letters, you've got petitions, you've got newspapers in Africa, all of those.

- Yeah.

- Why did you make those particular choices?

- We think about the medium that we use to make change as being the most important element in actually affecting a difference in the world.

I mean, if you talk to people, that's how you, if you could just get like a hashtag to go viral, or (laughs) that will change everything.

So we're very accustomed to the idea that a medium, a form of communication has a critical role to play in social and political change, right?

But we have a bit of amnesia about the entire human history, like before, like 30 years ago, right?

- That's very true.

- Where people did not have these digital tools, and there are really interesting ways of understanding what works and what doesn't work.

If we just step back into the past and look at something like letters and not just take for granted that, oh, that's the thing that existed.

But actually line it up with a Twitter and see what the difference are between those.

Or take something like a real world petition where you have to go and collect signatures and go door to door and compare that to something that you just click on online.

Actually, do that progression throughout history of different forms of communication, a different medium and what it could provide the group of people who were trying to incubate something new.

That was the heart of the project.

So in order to do that, I needed a comparison point.

And so going historically and looking at things pre-digitally, different forms of communication, that was really helpful for that purpose.

The petition which was an extraordinary thing when you think about it, this was 1838.

And England had the sense of itself as being a very democratic place from the time of the Magna Carta.

But in reality there was a very small sliver of men who were allowed to actually vote, a very, very small percentage of the population.

You had to have property, you had to prove a certain kind of status in society.

And at the same time you have industrialization is really like picked up in a big way, and people's lives are really suffering as a result, their living conditions.

I mean, it was pretty awful by the 1830s to go to like a Manchester or Birmingham.

So they're saying we want to be able to impact the way the rules work here about how long the working day could be or whether children have to work or ...

But they don't have no lever, they have no power at all.

And the thing is, they don't even really think of themselves as a constituency.

This is, again, this notion of mind's changing.

So they don't think of themselves as being a working class that should demand its right to vote.

They're just like people who are suffering under the yoke of having to work crazy hours and not make enough money and see their whole cities turn black from cole smoke.

And so the only leverage they have is this weird loophole in British law where you can petition the King in parliament.

But it had only really been used for land disputes and really small scale things.

But here comes this movement called Chartism, that it says we're gonna petition that we should have the right to vote, right?

And they managed to collect 1.3 million signatures in 1838, which is crazy.

I mean when you think about just the logistics involved in getting that many signatures onto a single scroll.

The scroll couldn't fit by the way through the door.

They had to take off the like- - Yeah, this is not change.org, right?

- Not change.org.

- Very big.

- And another way that it's not change.org, and this is my bigger point, is that the process of going out and convincing people to sign this thing, the function of it as a medium is not just let's represent ourselves to power because we're putting 1.3 million signatures on a scroll, it's, I have to talk to you and let you understand that we're in this together, we're working class, this is what it means to be working class.

You should really sign this thing because it means that we're representing ourselves to power and then we're making a claim for a certain rights.

And this is a huge thing because then what spun out from that petition drive was a real sense of collective, a constituency was born.

But the cohesiveness was the petition.

It's the thing that sort of brought them together.

'Cause there was just a lot of angry people out there running around with stakes and in night burning things and like ...

But the ... No, it's true.

- Yeah, they got in trouble.

- Yeah, they got in trouble, but the petition was a way to bring everything and focus it onto this point, and it was a literal point where it's sign your name here.

So I became very fascinated with that as this important tool that they had 'cause it demanded work, right?

Getting people to sign those petitions demanded work and it provided a framework for moving them from just being scattered, angry people to being a political constituency, which is so important if you want to make any claim for power inside of any kind of representational system.

(upbeat music) Black Lives Matter was a really interesting chapter for me to do because this was a group of activists who had sort of gone on a learning curve over the last 10 years.

They saw what happens when you have the world's attention suddenly turned towards you, and you don't necessarily have a plan for what to do with it after everyone goes home from the protest.

They experienced that, these highs and lows.

The social media tension could be like a sugar high could like be exciting, and feel promising and then be like, "Oh wait, what?

Like if we want to change the way policing works in our town, what are we doing to actually change the makeup of the city council?

Or convince more people who are skeptical of this idea that they should come along with us?"

Those are on the ground organizing things that a lot of the people that I talk to came to understand that they needed to do that hard work.

The one group that I focused on, The Dream Defenders was a local group in Miami.

They actually did what they called a blackout where they deleted their apps for two months because, and it was really useful for them because they ended up going door to door and really talking with people in their own communities.

And they began to realize that their ideas about abolishing the police were not really acceptable to people there.

They didn't wanna get rid of the police.

They said weren't happy with certain aspects of policing, but they didn't, the very people that they were supposedly representing were like, "No, we don't actually want that.

We don't wanna get rid of all the cops."

What they wanted was a conversation about how things could be different.

And that forced the activists to moderate their own points of view.

If they were gonna claim to represent these communities they needed to really talk with them and set up forums for conversations and come to a new set of demands and ways to get to those demands that would be actually consistent with what everybody wanted.

And not just about yelling very loudly and getting everybody provoked and angry.

- Do you feel like you're a radical thinker?

Is that why you're a journalist?

Is that why you do what you do?

- I don't know if I'm a radical thinker.

I think I'm very interested in the way that change happens in society.

That I think that the process by which we can all have one accepted consensus reality and then that can shift over time, that's really interesting to me.

Because I think it's a combination of lots of little processes that happen and there are places you can look like communication and the modes of communication and the way those change that can help you understand what might lead to one kind of change or another.

But, like my grandparents were all Holocaust survivors and I grew up with all of these stories of them living in one sort of environment that, a social environment that then changed dramatically over the course of just a few years.

- Yeah, very much.

- There were stuff that was maybe under the surface that they understood was threatening but it didn't come anywhere near what would happen to them.

And so I think I grew up always with that sense of there is something fungible about the way society and politics works and that there are forces that can shift things very quickly or even slowly, but in dramatic ways.

And so that's a real curiosity of mine.

So I don't know if I'm not like putting myself on the front line necessarily but I'm interested in standing to the side and seeing what's happening, how is it actually working?

- Well, I think everyone should be reading you because I think you are.

- Oh, well thank you.

- Gal, thank you so much for being here.

This was fascinating.

- Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me.

- And thank you for watching A Word on Words.

I'm J.T.

Ellison, keep reading.

(upbeat music)